Confessions of a fashionista: 'If you wear something stunning, tight and restrictive then you reduce the risk of over eating'

Uncomfortable finery: All fashionistas spend months planning the perfect Christmas outfit to ensure they control their appetites

It's still the holiday season in fashion-land.

I'm in an office in the rainy UK, but everyone I'm texting and emailing is sat on a sunny beach in the Caribbean, or Thailand, or wherever is hot (in every sense of the word) for 2011. No-one wants to talk about work.

The fashionistas who are back are reliving their break. Some of my colleagues have posted photos on Facebook of Christmas at their family's country estates. The pictures look like stills from the set of Poirot, but with more skinny jeans. Moi?

I took my uppity, London-centric designer-obsessed self back to the middle class normality of my parents house in the Home Counties. And so the epic culture clash began.

There was the thorny issue of presents. Each year I buy my Mum gifts the magazines would be proud of; hampers from Selfridges, Laduree macaroons, Perrier Jouet – Belle Epoque. And each year my exquisite, expensive presents are greeted with same unenthusiastic response; 'I prefer Chardonnay, and Quality Street would be fine.'

My Mum has given up trying to buy gifts for me. Unless I've provided a detailed list, (with weblinks, sizes and pictures), I receive vouchers. John Lewis Vouchers. With which, my Mum explains, I can “buy some nice clothes for work”. What she thinks I'd be able to wear from John Lewis to work in the fashion industry I have no idea?!

Each outfit I appeared in for the rounds of parties and family get-together's was greeted with my Mother's disdain.

Shorts, (with opaques and flat ankle boots I hasten to add), were 'not appropriate' and anything even slightly stylish, say a teeny, tiny bit of structured tailoring, was deemed as 'mad' and I was told 'you can't wear that round here!' It was like being flung back in time to my teenage years.

My Mum even rang me in advance this year to make sure I packed something 'warm and sensible'. I had nightmares of her dressing me in a winceyette nightie.

Most are of the opinion if you wear something stunning, tight and restrictive then you reduce the risk of over eating.

Come Christmas morning I gave a little chuckle at the thought of them pulling themselves into sausage like Spanx, constricting themselves in Herve Leger dresses and wearing crippling Louboutins while I spent the day relaxing in my pyjamas.

Back at work now in all my uncomfortable finery I think, that just sometimes, my Mum has got it right.